Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘What’s that? What?’

  ‘They learnt from you, as your army learnt from them.’

  ‘What do you mean, my army?’

  ‘Your army was victorious. It has fought more battles than you know. It fought again after we had scratched you and was victorious. It is an army experienced against our enemy.’

  ‘I do not understand what you mean.’

  ‘But our enemy has learnt from its experience. With these others,’ said Gugglerum, but he made no gesture. Bates did not know what he meant. ‘With these others it overcomes its objectives quickly, and deadly.’

  ‘Sir Gugglerum,’ said Bates. ‘You must explain to me what...’

  A shout resounded. From the end of the road. Bates looked up. It was a man. It was a soldier. A scarlet-uniformed soldier. ‘Man!’ this individual bellowed. ‘Man!’ An English soldier.

  ‘Holloa!’ cried Bates, ridiculously grateful to have encountered a living being in this deathly village. He put up his arm and waved.

  The soldier seemed, for a moment, to be falling forward; but he was merely launching into a jog-trot along the road and towards Bates. Gugglerum was back in his little flying machine. Its engine started, pudda-pudda-putudda, and the thing rolled wobbly along the road.

  The soldier was running faster now. ‘Hey! Hey!’

  ‘I am English,’ cried Bates, waving both his arms. ‘An English gentleman!’

  The plane was in the air now, on an upward line, and it started to bank and turn. The soldier skidded to a halt and dropped to one knee, simultaneously pulling his rifle from where it was slung upon his back. Bates saw then what he was about. ‘No!’ he cried, and started forward. ‘No! No!’

  But the man had levelled his weapon, and was aiming it at Gugglerum’s flying craft. He swung the barrel carefully, following his target. He, ptang!, fired. The noise bashed against Bates’s ears, it was so very loud, so very at odds with the hush, hush of the river and the silence of the streets. Smoke poured promiscuously from the end of the barrel.

  He had missed his aim. Gugglerum continued to climb in his toy craft, higher and higher, a hundred feet or more. But the soldier took a second aim, and fired once more, and this time, this time his aim was true. Ptang!—thd. Bates watched as the flying device folded in its middle and broke in two. The chatter of its engine ceased. Shards tumbled and separated and it fell as rubbish from the sky, away behind the houses.

  The soldier was at Bates’s side. ‘Lucky for you,’ he said, his voice tinged with London, ‘that I’m the sharpshooter that I am. They’re buggers, them littlers.’

  ‘He was,’ said Bates, still trying to understand what had happened.

  ‘I’m with the Seventeenth Buffs, up on that hill,’ said the soldier, swinging his rifle back onto his back. ‘Charlie Cheeks, my name. Yourn?’

  ‘Abraham Bates,’ said Bates, automatically. ‘He was my ally.’

  ‘Ally?’

  ‘That Blefuscan.’

  ‘That be-what-un?’

  ‘That Lilliputian fellow. You just killed him.’

  ‘They’re tricky buggers,’ said Cheeks, nodding, as if Bates were confirming what he had said ‘Caused us some real problems. But lucky enough they abn’t hard to kill, once’n you’ve located them. Their size makes ’em vulnerable.’

  ‘He was,’ said Bates, fixing the soldier with his eye, ‘he was telling me something. He was in the very process of telling me something of the very greatest significance.’

  Cheeks was nodding again. ‘Them flying devices,’ he said. ‘They’bn the trickiest of all. In them, see, they can fly off like regular birds. They get in the sky above you - we had a flock of them. No lie, a reg’lar flock. They were shitting out incendries, excuse the expression I pray you but that’s what it was.’

  ‘This one,’ said Bates again, feeling the admixture of hopelessness in his frustration, ‘was our ally. An ally of the English cause. He was helping me. He and I were on our way to York.’

  ‘It’s good,’ said Cheeks, ‘to see another living soul, and I can say so. They’re all dead roundabouts, all these Yorkshiremen and Yorkshirewomen. We’ve been sore taken with the plague oursel, to be truthful.’

  ‘The plague,’ said Bates.

  ‘Come along, you’ll have to talk to my Captain. He’s not well himself, to be truthful - up here.’ He took Bates’s elbow. ‘End of the street and up the hill. Like I say, it’s a fortunate thing that they’re easy enough to kill.’

  And so they marched off together, along the road of the dead village, and up the hill to the encampment of English soldiery. Bates was still stunned. And here were the Seventeenth Buffs, three tents and a campfire. And here was the Captain, on a stretcher, looking poorly and like to die; pale as wax and shivery, shivery. And here a dozen soldiers in the scarlet uniforms with the tan facings, no more than seventeen left alive. ‘We’ve buried a number,’ Cheeks was saying. ‘And a large number at that. We were to flank - there’s a battle brewing, over yonder, York way. We were to make our way about and stab the Frenchies in the kidneys. We and many other battalions, though it’s only us left. We started with four score and now we’re twelve fighting-fit and five more in a poor way. Wonder what good we can do now. Though wondering is for captains. And the Captain, as you can see, is not well.’

  And during the whole of this speech Bates, still stunned, was trying to make sense of the last thing Gugglerum had said, as if it were the secret and the mystery and the key that would explain everything and make everything come right.

  [7]

  Eleanor had wanted only to ask the giant about the nature of the light in the sky, for it seemed to her a scientific mystery, and one of the very greatest importance. It went without saying that, as such, it must be reducible to a coherent scientific account. But no sooner had she reached his hut-like boot, big as a cabin of leather, than there was a mighty sensation of applied force. Force directed fully upon her, like a blow from every direction at once. There was a dazzle of light, too much for her eyes to deal with. She knew, of course, that the eye has a tiny orifice of muscle - that the pupil of an eyeball, which seems so solid, is in fact an absence, opening or closing like a mouth to draw in more or less light. She knew that in the presence of a great phosphoric stimulus the pupil shrinks to a moue. She thought all this with a slow, rational mentation, even as the gravity vanished and her stomach clenched and she rose into the air. Her ears were filled with the noise of surf, or rushing wind. Reaching forward she encountered something solid but yielding, a curving shield of leather, a great shoe. The next thing: she made body-contact with the shoe, as if she had stumbled forward upon it. But there was no ground over which she might stumble.

  The rushing noise withdrew from her ears, leaving a single pure soprano note. She swallowed, and swallowed again, and the noise disappeared.

  Everything was white.

  The great shoe shifted beneath her, and she cried out, but although her diaphragm worked underneath her ribs no voice emerged. This peculiar detail was the first to alarm her. She tried again: forced air through her throat in as hefty a shout as she could utter. Nothing, again, nothing. She must have been deafened, she was deaf. Oh unfortunate!

  But, no: she could hear her own bloodstream gushing and pulsing. She paid attention: she could hear her own heartbeat too. But she could not hear herself speak. And yet, when she spoke she felt her throat vibrate, and sound is of course nothing more than the vibrations of such surfaces in air.

  The ground shifted again, and lifted. She felt the tug of gravity again, for she was conscious of being swung high, and then lowered again. She tried to shout out in alarm, but there was no sound.

  Then the giant heel impacted silently upon a floor. Eleanor fell from the curve of the great boot and jarred her hindquarters upon a floor. Perfectly white, perfectly smooth, like the finest and most flawless polished white marble reaching in every direction around her as far as her eyes could see. If a comet be made of light, only, then this is
what it would be to exist inside such a medium. The giant towered above her, his head lost in dazzle and blanch. His great foot lifted and swept through the air and away.

  It disappeared into the dazzling fog of white.

  Eleanor got to her feet.

  Her eyes were already beginning to adjust to her new environment: a vastly spacious hall, larger than the sky, like a canvas painted by John Martin, like an opium-eater’s vision. It was a space clearly lit, but not as white as Eleanor had at first thought, for in the air were colourfield stretches of blue, and pink. She could see him now, the Brobdingnagian upon whose boot she had travelled, a little way off, but in motion: walking away from her, with his great head upwards. Eleanor craned her own head, followed the direction he was looking, and saw the object of his scrutiny. It was a shape, like a stormcloud. It hovered in the space, a diffuse and floating vastness. But, as she looked, she saw other shapes: great columns, shattered and leaning, as from a ruined temple worthy of Pandaemonium; such that the idea occurred briefly to her as to whether she were not now dead and transported to some other realm. But then, with a tickling sensation in her abdomen, of the sort that often accompanied mental insight or inspiration, she comprehended. These vast and disparate shapes were all part of one shape, and that was proportioned as a man. A being so much larger than the Brobdingnagians that they were like unto specks.

  Giants upon giants.

  She stumbled upon nothing. Even though she took no step she stumbled, and fell backwards to sit hard down on the white floor. Her mouth was open. The more she looked the more she could comprehend. There were several of the larger variety of giants in this space: two, three, four. They were in various poses: one standing, one sitting, one leaning forward over some unseen object of attention. The standing one was larger than a mountain. He was a feature of the landscape rather than any living object. The Brobdingnagian took a few more dwarfish steps and then stood. His voice rumbled out and was swallowed in the enormous space. But, Eleanor said to herself, there was a rational likelihood here. It was something, she said to herself, the possibility of which ought to have occurred to her: if there be Lilliputians and humans and Brobdingnagians, then why not continue the scale upwards? And—who knew? Perhaps there were creatures, somewhere in the cosmos, to whom these colossal creatures were but toys - Hyper-hyper-gigantos. Why not, indeed? Why not supercolossi?

  She felt a strange queasiness coming upon her, and she lay down supine upon the floor. On her back. Then on her side, which brought this surface closer to her eyes. And perhaps it was a better object for her contemplation than these world-sized beings, carrying shields as large as the moon and spears larger than the trunk of the world-tree itself. The floor. The floor appeared perfectly smooth, a white substance not unlike marble but slightly more pliable. It was warm to the touch.

  Her eyes closed. She felt dizzy. Did she sleep?

  A rumbling. If she had been asleep then this noise woke her. If not it merely caught her attention.

  Feeling, abruptly, exposed and vulnerable Eleanor got quickly to her feet. Her head swooned. She pressed her temples and tried to pull herself together.

  The Brobdingnagian was sitting cross-legged before her. ‘Little lady,’ he rumbled.

  ‘Sir Giant.’

  ‘How did you come here?’ It took, as always with the giants, a great length of time for the sentence to roll itself out.

  ‘I was upon your shoe,’ she said.

  ‘Speak louder, little one.’

  ‘Your shoe! I was upon your shoe!’

  ‘Ahhh.’ He nodded, a gesture as slow and solid as the tides in an ocean.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘With the great folk. This is their house.’

  ‘Their house?’

  ‘I have spoken to them. They are—’

  ‘Who are they? Where is their house? Is it the light in the sky? Have we climbed into the sky? Have they lifted us into the sky?’

  ‘Little lady,’ grumbled the giant. ‘Please, you should speak more slowly.’

  ‘I am sorry, Sir Giant.’

  ‘I have spoken to the man.’

  ‘Man?’

  ‘He has a name.’

  ‘What is his name?

  ‘His name,’ said the giant, ponderously, ‘is called Littlebig.’

  ‘Littlebig?’

  ‘He says...’ but here, shaking his head, the giant reached down with the palm of his hand and slapped the floor. Eleanor braced herself, expecting there to be some tremor passed through the material to where she stood, but this did not happen. Instead a pool opened at her feet, a great lake-sized stretch of clarity in the white floor. It took a moment for her to realise that the floor had disappeared. She was falling through the air like Mulciber to dash herself to death on the ground far below. She cried out, hugged herself, and her feet skittered and danced, but the floor had not disappeared. Though she felt the terror of one about to fall, she did not fall. The floor had acquired a transparency of unusual limpidity, but there was still a floor.

  ‘Watch,’ said the giant, and he ground his palm against the floor.

  Below - for, of course, they were indeed suspended in mid-air - Eleanor could see the Yorkshire landscape. Then the image shivered and resolved itself again. Eleanor had again the sensation of plummeting - her viscera contracted within her - and she gasped again: but she had not moved. The image had become magnified, as with the Leeuwenhoek microscopic technologies, except on an unimaginable scale and with an extraordinary facility. She saw the two armies, French and English, distributed about the green hills and green valleys: thousands of troops, all tiny as toy soldiers.

  ‘I was there,’ she cried, excited.

  She could see the trickling movement of men along a valley; and, there, men passing into a trench cut into the hill, where shadow hid them. And, there, three dozen: shapes - cannons. And now whiteness squirted from the barrels of these guns. And now florettes of grey sprouted on the green. Like splatches of boiled water scattered in an ant’s nest these florettes caused great commotion amongst the men. Some scurried, others jerked left and right and lay still. There was a sudden surge forward of a great many scarlet-coloured men. Ranks of giants stood perfectly motionless, like colossal Egyptian statues, as the smoke and commotion swirled around them. It was all perfectly silent.

  ‘Monsieur Littlebig is intrigued,’ boomed the Brobdingnagian.

  ‘It is war.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘My fiancé is there.’

  ‘The Dean of York. A powerful man-in-Christ.’

  ‘He is in danger! Can we not snatch him up to this vantage, as I was snatched ?’

  ‘You rode,’ said the giant, ‘my boot.’

  He paddled on the floor with his enormous forefinger and again the image shimmered and changed scale. At that moment Eleanor understood. ‘You pressed upon the floor to - knock away its shutters,’ she said, excited. The giant looked at her, as giants often do: the slow, contemplative look that often precedes their speech. It was a long time before Eleanor realised that this giant was not about to speak.

  ‘To make the floor glassy, to create transparency,’ she urged. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘It is a device,’ rumbled the giant. ‘Like the clockwork of watches, though more subtle.’

  ‘I see that,’ said Eleanor, a fire lit up inside her.

  ‘Press the hand upon it, and twist.’

  ‘Butwillitworkfor ... oh no matter,let me experiment.’ She pulled off her glove and laid her hand flat. But nothing happened, nothing happened, and she slid her palm left and right and up and down and nothing happened, and then, suddenly - as if she had chanced upon some secret switch, the floor started to whiten and the vision to disappear. By rotating her hand first one way and then another she was able to clear the floor or fill it with opacity. It was a simple matter, then, for a person of Eleanor’s systematic and rapid wits, to determine the gestures that controlled the telescopic magnification. She pulled the image,
as it were, towards her - until individual men became discernible and even recognisable.

  A kind of joy filled her heart. Not her heart of course, for that was mere conventional speech. It was a joy of the mind. But her heart did scurry, and a warmth did spill through her belly and her loins. Machinery, but so superb a piece of machinery - so cunningly worked, elegantly constructed. Like a combination telescope-microscope. The gods of Homerus, seated upon their clouds, must have examined the battlefield before Troy with precision like this.

  She permitted her vision to swoop and dart like a peregrine. When she lifted her point de vue high in the sky the two armies became two wriggling masses, like two stretches of caviar spread over the green, except moving and twitching. Like, perhaps, tadpoles twitching on a green board. But sweep down, and the dots resolved into grubs, and then into individual toy soldiers. And with a firm spin of her palm a single soldier swelled to fill her vision. She saw him from above, but the glass possessed the curious property of rendering him in a plastic and sculptural manner: not quite, but almost as if height and depth and breadth were included in the vision. Eleanor could see his face, exhausted-looking, as he rested, using his rifle as a crutch. The blue weave of his uniform. She could see the black dots of uncropped beard upon his chin and cheeks. The bar of his brow over small, blue eyes. And then (the image staying perfectly centred) he lurched back, and pulled his rifle up, and wrestled with it to aim. There was a puff of dust or smoke, silver-grey, and he stood straight up, very straight, the rifle-butt still at his shoulder. Eleanor could not, at first, see what had happened. She inched the image back, to get a fuller view. Her man was there, blue-clad, standing straight up. His rifle had shattered. Had it blown to shards when he attempted to fire it? Or had it been struck by a musket ball from the enemy? She inched in again. His right hand held the shattered stock, his finger still hooked in the trigger guard, but bloody and dripping. The barrel was gone. The stock was in splinters. His face was bleeding. Needles of wood had embedded themselves therein. All from a mere puff of dust! But, of course, the artificial silence of these images belied the violence. She waited for him to fall, but he did not, he stood still.